The present invention relates to wireless communication and, more particularly, to a method and system with which a user of a wireless transceiver can be informed which other users, of similar wireless transceivers, who are of interest to the user, are available for communication.
Cellular telephony networks are well-known and ubiquitous. A subscriber to a cellular telephony service can use a mobile telephone to communicate with other subscribers, or with subscribers to ordinary, fixed telephony service. The communication is wireless, via a set of fixed base stations.
Direct wireless communication between users of mobile handsets also is known. One such method of particular interest is the “three-in-one” usage model of “voice over BLUETOOTH™” as defined by Ericsson of Stockholm, Sweden under the BLUETOOTH™ standard for short-range ad hoc wireless networks, or “piconets”. (Even though, strictly speaking, the term “piconet” is specific to the BLUETOOTH™ standard, this term is used herein to refer to an ad-hoc, temporary wireless network established under either BLUETOOTH™ or any similar wireless communication protocol.) In the most common implementations of the “three-in-one” model in “voice over BLUETOOTH™”, the mobile telephone is used as a wireless telephone in communication with a home base station, or as a cellular telephone; but the model also includes the possibility of peer-to-peer communication in “intercom” mode.
The SERIES 60 SMARTPHONE™ software platform of Nokia Corp. Espoo, Finland supports multiplayer games in BLUETOOTH™. Users of devices that are based on this platform can get together to create a BLUETOOTH™ piconet for playing interactive multiplayer games. Friends can arrange to meet to play games, but there is no convenient way for friends to identify each other in a crowd for the purpose of spontaneously forming a BLUETOOTH™ piconet to play a game. More generally, there is no convenient way for a mobile phone user to use his/her mobile phone to identify members of a common interest group who coincidentally are nearby. The BLUETOOTH™ standard includes a “device discovery procedure” by which one BLUETOOTH™ device discovers which other BLUETOOTH™ devices are within wireless communication range; but this procedure finds all such devices, not just the devices that belong to members of a common interest group.